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LinkedIn To Sell $100 Million More In Stock

The funds from the sale will be used for working capital, expanding product development and field sales, capital expenditures and strategic acquisitions or investments. Linkedin went public in May, with its stock price spiking in its IPO. But LinkedIn sold just 8.3% of its stock in the IPO.

LinkedIn earlier reported third quarter earnings that beat analysts’ estimates. Fresh off those numbers, Linkedin plans to add 500 to 600 net new employees in the fourth quarter, up from what has been 250 to 300 per quarter, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in a conference call with analysts Thursday.

The increase in fourth quarter hiring is partly because LinkedIn plans to get a jump on 2012 early. The company plans to continue hiring engineers to build out products and to scale its technology to enable faster product release cycles. LinkedIn also wants to add more sales people early so that they can move quickly in 2012. Asked how the company can manage hiring at double its typical rate, Weiner said, “We spent a lot of time building a firm foundation that enables us to manage hyper-growth… Bottom line is we’re not going to hire folks who we’re not capable of making productive from day one.”

A major area of growth for LinkedIn was in mobile. Page views on mobile were up 400% year over year, representing more than 10% of total page views and more than 12% of total unique visits in the quarter. That compares to mobile usage a year ago that was “immaterial,” meaning negligible, said Steve Sordello, CFO of LinkedIn. The growth was driven in part by new mobile apps for iOS and Android that the company recently released (story). As far as monetizing mobile and how that differs from the desktop, Weiner said the company is actively working on it. “Given that mobile is far and away our fastest growing product and service, we’re thinking through how to monetize mobile and we’re hoping to begin that next year.

Students and recent college graduates are the company’s fastest growing demographic. LinkedIn recently launched new tools focused on this sector, particularly because many students don’t have job experience that they can post on the site. LinkedIn added an alumni tool so that students can see what companies the alumni from their colleges work at, and who in their network is connected to them.

LinkedIn also recently announced Talent Pipeline, a tool for recruiters to manage and track all their leads–even those from outside of LinkedIn. That product is expected to launch in the first half of 2012.

In the quarter LinkedIn acquired two companies, real-time hosted search company IndexTank and social CRM company Connected (story).

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